Substantive reading for a limited audience.
A collection of writing spotlighting the “monster” that is the American prison system.
“There is a quiet jail boom occurring across the United States,” write editors Norton, Pelot-Hobbs, and Schept, all of whom have written extensively on criminal justice in the U.S. What they and the other unapologetically leftist contributors to this book mean is that prisons have assumed outsize roles in what they see as an ongoing American class war. Using data from cities and towns all over the U.S., the contributors demonstrate that with every new jail built, an infrastructure that promotes racism, sexism, and income inequality becomes increasingly more powerful. Jasmine Heiss suggests that where poverty is highest, “incarceration and policing is often the only ‘fix’ on offer for social crises across the urban-to-rural spectrum.” Her piece clearly exposes the insidious nature of “the local jail.” The brutal realities masked by this “carceral humanism,” which recasts punishment as a form of social service, include a shredded social safety net and the disappearance of jobs offering a decent standard of living. Furthermore, note the editors, fighting the system of incarceration has become increasingly difficult because the system, supported by powerful politicians on the right, “keeps changing shape” as it grows. Yet there’s still hope. Interviews with James Kilgore, an activist for reformist programs designed to treat prisoners with greater dignity, and Dawn Harrington and Gicola Lane, two women who offer “support, education, [and] advocacy” to families of the incarcerated, suggest that change can still come about through dedicated effort. Though the text is often too academic for general readers, social justice activists and those with an interest in criminal justice issues will especially appreciate these well-researched, thoughtful essays that reveal just how much power government policies have given to the American carceral system.
Substantive reading for a limited audience.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781804291313
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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